Seeing Indigenous Siberia like a Populist: Anna Smelova, Imagining Indigenous Siberia: Populist Ethnography of Northeast Asia Under Late Imperial Russian and Early Soviet Regimes, Georgetown University, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Seeing Indigenous Siberia like a Populist: Anna Smelova, Imagining Indigenous Siberia: Populist Ethnography of Northeast Asia Under Late Imperial Russian and Early Soviet Regimes, Georgetown University, 2025

25Feb26

Abstract: This dissertation examines the role of political exiles in gathering ethnographic knowledge about Siberia’s Indigenous peoples and influencing nationalities policies in Russia before and after 1917. Specifically, this work explores how 13 former members of the Populist (Narodnik) political movement—agrarian socialists exiled to Sakha (Yakutia) in Eastern Siberia and Russia’s Far East in the late 19th century—developed a distinct ethnographic approach. Seeking to propagate revolutionary ideas and collect folklore among the local population, the outcast intellectuals applied their emancipatory platform to Indigenous communities, paradoxically contributing to Russia’s enduring efforts to integrate the borderlands into the imperial core. I argue that these Populists-turned-ethnographers were among the first Russian revolutionaries to extend their class-based rhetoric to Indigenous peoples of Northeast Asia. Moreover, my analysis demonstrates that former Populists, in many ways, anticipated the Bolshevik Indigenization policies of the 1920s, which aimed to promote Native languages and cultures under socialism. Their long-term banishment to Siberia and interactions with local communities determined the Populist anthropological methodology: long-term fieldwork as a form of voluntary exile, proficiency in Native languages, and collaboration with Indigenous intelligentsia and informants. These principles were further institutionalized within the late imperial and early Soviet academia. To trace the continuities and ruptures in Populist ethnographic practices across 1917, I examine two key expeditions—the 1894–1896 Sibiriakov expedition and the 1925–1930. Complex expedition to Sakha (Yakutia). Ethnographic programs of both projects relied on the participation of former exiles and their collaborations with the regional administration on the one hand and the Native intelligentsia on the other. Although by the late 1920s Populist ethnography primarily declined, disrupted by Stalin’s Bolshevization of ethnography and political dynamics in Eastern Siberia, many of its disciplinary foundations persisted within the Soviet ethnology of the North as a part of the Leningrad school of ethnography.

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